Nicole Belle: The Rev Sanchez Series April 5, 2008

Photographer Nicole Belle will be showing with us this April. Her work seeks the establishment of a true image by forced and even radically stylized orchestration, in the same way that mythology creates situations truer or more applicable to experience than any fact. For the Rev Sanchez series, Belle used Sixties-era negatives found in a Los Angeles-area thrift store, depicting young women and men modeling poolside, or in a park, reportedly from the personal archive of a semi-professional photographer. She then combined individual frames of the photo shoots to create a doubling, tripling, or quadrupling of the figures. Not only does this expand the field of the negative beyond the spatial boundaries of its original composition, but also beyond the temporal boundaries of its original moment. It is no longer a single instance, but rather, a span. Even better, she feel the young subjects are “transformed, from passive objects of the photographer’s gaze to a collective force unto themselves.” They stand on their own, as archetypal personas and mythological beasts of the late 20th century.

Official Website: http://www.foundla.com/sys/shows/nicole-belle/